Kickarustarter: Icarus Proudbottom: Starship Captain

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After a decades or perhaps even centuries-long conquest, Icarus Proudbottom is finally finished teaching ushow to type. He and his Native American spirit owl pal Jerry have imparted all possible knowledge unto us, filled our brains to bursting with virtuoso-level flicks of the wrist, flights of fingers. Our WPMs are godlike. We have transcended the mortal linguistic plane. We are no longer of this Earth. So what’s next? Space! Icarus Proudbottom: Starship Captain, an adventure-ish game described as “like a mix of Artemis Bridge Simulator and classic LucasArts adventure titles.” It takes place entirely on the bridge of a starship, and it’s pretty much guaranteed to be very silly.

Looks rather nice, no? The voice acting could use some work and I wouldn’t say all of those jokes exactly landed, but the previous Icarus games were rather funny. I’m interested to see what this already completely unhinged universe could be with a bigger budget.

Here’s what developer Holy Wow is shooting for:

“Icarus Proudbottom: Starship Captain is not an action game, a strategy game, a build-a-ship simulator, or a 4X Space Epic – there are already hundreds of those! It’s a character-driven adventure game & bridge simulator whose goal is to make you feel the pressure and joys of being a captain and communicating with your crew. It features combat, exploration, puzzle-solving, dialogue trees, and more!”

“What do you do [if you’re under attack]? Order Digby to change course? Order Mark 22 to adjust your laser frequencies so you deal more damage? Attempt to hail the ship and ask them to surrender? Increase power to your lasers? Increase power to your shields? As Captain, the decision is yours to make – but you must act quickly.”

So it actually seems like there’s a rather robust game underlying all the goofs, japes, shenanigans, and bananagrams. That’s especially impressive given that Holy Wow is a studio composed of two humans and two cats. Hopefully more cats get added as a stretch goal.

Icarus Proudbottom: Starship Captain is currently on Kickstarter, and it’s seeking $50,000 in order to prime its excessively prideful bottom for takeoff. So far it hasn’t gotten off to the quickest of starts, but there’s still plenty of time, and the goal is fairly modest in the grand scheme of things.

All this from a series starter that was about soaring through the skies on a galeforce jetstream of your own poo. I can’t help but applaud Holy Wow for taking a single joke (or set of characters who make up a larger joke, really) this far, so I’m pulling for them.

I just went to read the article about their “shitty” first game and in the comments section they actually replied and said “I have a concept in mind in which he is now a starship captain” and now this happens. It’s funny that you can see that they had this idea since before 26/01/2011 and only now has it surfaced and become a kickstarter project.

Yes, this. Dear Kickstarter project creators: cut this out; everyone who backs you on KS is an “early bird”, and I’ve reached the point where limited special-offer backer levels piss me off so much I simply won’t back your project.

Yeah, but they don’t account for the people it will annoy and put off backing. There’s a simple way to get that early momentum and that’s just to ask friends, family and fans to back early. Jamie Stegmeier has the best info on it, as ever: link to stonemaiergames.com